Deadline Y2K (33 page)

Ten seconds later a high-pressure boiler exploded in Astoria Generator Three, killing four workers instantly and wounding five more. Astoria tripped and went off-line. In the Hudson Avenue plant, supposedly Y2K compliant voltage controls had been remediated by a programmer asleep at the compiler. He'd missed thousands of date-fields because they'd been named “Zorro” by the original programmer. When Zorro met the 21st Century, the devilish swordsman corrupted the compliant code and sent false readings to the operators' screens. Well-trained and prepared for false readings that fell outside the parameters of possibility, the plant operator disconnected the sensors and shifted voltage control to a backup system. The last thing he saw on his screen was the infected backup system tripping the plant and shutting down everything, including his monitor.

At the Narrows plant, a bizarre reading from emission controls immediately tripped the plant, shut down the generators, and took it off-line. Staten Island and the southern half of Brooklyn suffered a brownout. Twenty seconds later, the first jolt of weird voltages rippled over the grid. The Northeast grid experienced failures and anomalies every day, but it had never endured hundreds of simultaneous malfunctions. When twenty-seven power plants north and west of the city failed immediately, all for different reasons, voltage across the grid suddenly dropped, causing widespread brownouts that lasted a few seconds. The remaining plants struggled to pick up the slack, but the failure of defective high-voltage regulators two hundred miles north in Vermont sent an uncontrollable power surge over the transmission lines that swept across the grid like a hurricane. To protect hardware from the surge, circuit breakers tripped power plants, transmission lines, and distribution substations, and in a minute and forty-three seconds, five hundred thousand square miles from Maine to the District of Columbia and east to Ohio blacked out. The Northeast grid crashed.

*   *   *

Three minutes later the Southeast grid flamed out along with Eastern Canada, the Yucatan peninsula and the islands of the Caribbean. The race with the most implacable of deadlines was lost. It was as though the Atlantic Ocean had overflowed its shores and swallowed North America.

In Washington, where 750,000 millennium celebrants had gathered in the Mall, the city turned as dark as the granite facade of the Vietnam memorial. Emergency generators popped on in the White House, but the millennium bug had decapitated the nation. Deep underground, the President was in a communications bunker talking to the military and the CIA, but he couldn't talk to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Charlotte, or Mobile. He couldn't call across town, for that matter.

America's long night of darkness began with sirens screaming down Pennsylvania Avenue. From Maine to Florida, the leaderless, disorganized nation entered the 21st Century in a state of total disarray.

The millennium bug had come home.

*   *   *

Unique and dazzling, New York was ablaze with light. The party continued in Times Square where the delirious crowd, oblivious to events elsewhere, celebrated the glorious arrival of the new millennium. The news that the entire world was dark beyond the Hudson passed quickly by word of mouth. Many dismissed it as a rumor. “And if it's true,” one drunk bellowed to another, “who cares?”

In the 24th Precinct, the prayer that ended the 20th Century greeted the new millennium with a rousing, “Hallelujah.”

At Bellevue, Packard sewed up the mayor's chest and took a straw poll of the nurses. “So,” he asked, “will you guys vote for Rudy again?”

On 85th Street, Donald Copeland heard a knock on his door. When he twisted the knob, to his surprise the door swung open and revealed Ed Garcia standing on the porch.

“I thought you guys were locked in,” the captain said, and when Copeland didn't respond, he added, “We got lights. How 'bout that.”

Copeland blinked. A cash register was jingling between his ears and he appeared more than a little bewildered. He blinked a few more times before he said, “Come in. Let's have a drink. Happy New Year.”

On Nassau Street, cool, unflappable Bo rushed to the bathroom and puked, leaving his seat vacant and headset dangling.

Three miles north, Sarah McFadden had closed her eyes, clasped her hands together, hurriedly mumbled a prayer, and listened for the hum of emergency generators that never came. All she heard was the buzz of excited people in the command center. She opened her eyes. The lights were on.

“Bo?” she said anxiously.

Doc turned on a speaker phone and said, “This is Doc. Bo will be right back.”

“Oh my God,” she uttered. “Whatever that young man did, it worked.”

“I'm going to reserve judgment on that,” Doc replied, reading Bo's screens. “You have problems at Ravenswood. Big Allis is not happy.”

“I'm on to that. Just let me catch my breath.”

Sheepishly, Bo emerged from the bathroom wiping his mouth.

“Sorry,” he apologized.

Doc wrapped him in a bear hug. Ronnie, Carolyn and Jody took turns hugging and kissing the embarrassed young man. Adrian, naturally, didn't move from his station. Judd added a hug and handshake and declared, “We're the only place within a thousand miles that has lights, Bo. You did it, man. All right.”

Bo broke free and plugged in his headset.

“Sarah?”

“We have trouble at Ravenswood.”

“Let's get on it. I have a set of diagnostics configured for each of the five plants. If they don't work, we'll try something else.”

The Midnight Club returned to their stations, astonished at Bo's success. With no way to test the system under battlefield conditions, Doc's plan and Bo's code had had a one in a million chance to succeed. Even if the code were perfect, the plan still should have failed because of embedded chips in the vast tangle of systems. As it was, Bo's applications kept the lights on in Manhattan. Across the East River, downtown Brooklyn remained brightly lit because power had to reach Jay Street to keep the subway running. A strip of Queens around the Ravenswood power plant near the Queensboro Bridge had lights thanks to proximity to Big Allis. The rest of New York was as dark as Moscow.

Let there be light, Doc thought, as he ran downstairs to the second floor where Annie and the customer support staff were working with the banks.

“Did Chase make it?” he demanded. “They should have power at the Tech Center.”

“They do,” Annie said. “They're okay.”

“The credit unions?”

“Everyone is okay, Doc. Relax.”

Annie pulled him over to one of the staff screens where a techie in a headset was in multimedia communication with the Chase Y2K team at the Tech Center. Doc could see that the bank's core computers had survived the century rollover and were performing, if not flawlessly, at least as well as they ever did.

“Is the microwave circuit to Chase okay?” Doc asked.

“Yeah, communication is fine, and the 2000 software is cool,” said the techie, a kid in a Princeton sweatshirt, “but the Metro Tech building is like full of bugs. The swing shift is locked in and the night shift locked out.”

Doc grinned, amused.

“Did you do that on purpose?” Annie asked, playfully punching Doc in the shoulder.

Doc punched her back and said, “I'll never tell.”

“I hear the lights went out in Boston,” the techie remarked.

“Yep.”

“And in Philly.”

“Yep.”

“Everywhere except here. Isn't that like, strange?”

“Nope. How're your phones?”

“It's really weird. Our phones are good, but everyone we call is like really surprised because they can't call out on their phones, and no one else can call them, either. It's like the phone gods smiled on us. We can call some places and not others. There's like no phones in Washington or Toronto. I knew this was going to be like, bizarre, but this is bizarre bizarre.”

Doc stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, causing the staff to glance up from their screens. Thirty heads sprouted like cabbages above the cubicle dividers.

“Annie tells me Chase and all our clients survived the millennium crunch,” Doc announced. “You're veteran troopers, and you've earned an honest victory tonight. I'm not going to make a ridiculous speech. I just want to say that everyone in this room will receive a bonus of $20,000. Thank you.”

The whistles and cheers lasted only a moment before everyone went back to work.

As they walked toward the door, Doc said, “Your people are doing terrific work, Annie. They're all great.”

“Now that the big moment has come and gone,” she said, “people are wondering about their jobs. The bonuses are nice, but they want to know if their jobs will be here next week.”

“Annie, tell them this isn't the end. It's only the beginning. Our people don't have to worry about their jobs. We have to worry about paying them enough to keep them.”

“How bad is it, Doc?”

“Depends on your point of view. You might say the collapse of civilization is not a bad thing if you think civilization is on the wrong track.”

“Don't be such a smart-ass.”

“Okay, let's see,” he said, “Around town, Brooklyn Union Gas has lost control of pressure regulators in the natural gas pipes and shut down. All broadcast TV has gone belly up, and two cable stations are the only TV right now. I think three radio stations are broadcasting music. Only a few Bell Atlantic and AT&T telephone lines are working, including yours. Police radios are working. In the outer boroughs, emergency generators are providing electricity to some buildings and hospitals. The subway is running.”

“Is there looting?”

“Too soon to tell.”

“How do you know?”

“I have a good police scanner,” he answered with a shrug. “I like toys.”

*   *   *

Computer malfunctions were instantaneous, but effects required several nanoseconds to manifest. Inside billions of silicon wafers, the flow of electrons responded to binary instructions the only way possible, taking the path of least resistance. The machines peeled off trillions of calculations in those first slim fractions of a second, following instructions written by human beings, and many of those humans were defective units. Because of human error, complacency, poor management, bad fixes and inadequate testing, three million computers in New York malfunctioned before the century was one second old.

Not all malfunctions were fatal, and many were rapidly fixed once they became apparent. A somewhat lesser number of machines survived with no malfunctions, but wide area networks of compliant machines were inoperable because phone systems were down. The ratio between effort put into Y2K remediation and survival was direct and merciless. Solid, meticulous, grueling inspection of applications, function point by function point and thorough conversion to four-digit date fields paid off. Sloppy, hurried patches and kludges failed. Curiously, the little things people had worried about—household appliances, cars and elevators had only minor problems. People had been so concerned about elevators that they'd been fixed. VCRs that displayed a two-digit date worked fine anyway. In a few cars digital dash displays went crazy, but the motors ran and the antilock brakes worked. It was not the small, personal systems that failed but rather the large, complex, next-to-invisible and taken-for-granted systems that comprised the infrastructure not only of the city and nation but the global economy that failed. It was the Big Picture right in front of everybody's eyes that disintegrated. All the major banks in New York survived but couldn't communicate with one another. Supply lines were disrupted at every link. Warehouse inventory controls were screwed up. Ship and rail traffic was crippled. Every single manufacturing plant, refinery, chemical fabricator and automated assembly line had a problem somewhere.

On the East Coast, only in New York and in those places with emergency generators did people have an opportunity to learn if their systems were good or bad. In the three time zones to the west, after learning of the calamitous events in the east, people woke up from a thirty-year snooze and initiated frantic efforts to prepare for the coming disaster. All remaining power grids and cooperatives initiated disconnects, the companies separating from one another and standing alone. Every energy worker who could be found was pulled in and given a crash course in manual workarounds to keep the plants up and running when equipment failed. The governors of eighteen states called out the National Guard, and thousands of earnest young men and women, largely from rural areas, were sent to patrol cities to prevent rioting and looting. In Milwaukee and Little Rock, the sudden military presence provoked the very rioting it was supposed to prevent. All over the West, survivalists hunkered down in their fallout shelters, the idea of individualism taken to the extreme. In most places, however, faced with a foreseeable crisis, people acted like intelligent, sensible members of a community and figured out ways to help one another. In small towns, people rallied to organize disaster relief, setting up shelters in high school gyms and rigging generators for grocery stores. From Chicago west, city officials called off the millennium parties, and police started moving people off the streets. Plant managers rushed to their facilities and turned everything off. Desperate shoppers stripped urban groceries bare.

As the millennium bug began its journey across North America, it was a little after 5:00 in the morning in London, 8:00 in Moscow and just past noon in Beijing. After shrinking for five hundred years, the world had suddenly expanded. The fragile network of telecommunications that had once unified the planet collapsed. Factories in China that supplied half of America's toys lost their computerized records. Chinese banks that handled the transactions were dead. The ship that carried the teddy bears was lost at sea. The oil refinery that produced the diesel fuel for the truck that carried the bears to Toys-R-Us was shut down. The teddy bears were okay. Neither they nor the workers who sewed them had chips.